Rex Ambler
12
THE CHRISTIAN MIND
OF ABRAHAM KUYPER
Rex Ambler
Holland in the nineteenth century was living under the shadow of the French Revolution. In political and social life she was undergoing changes that were clearly effected by the ideals and ideas that brought about that revolutionary change in France in the 1790s. She was learning, like France, to throw off the yoke of political dogmatism and to think and act for herself in affairs of government. The ideals and ideas that inspired them were very largely derived from Rousseau and the European Romantics. The ideals were centered on the freedom of man, his right to determine his own destiny and fashion his life according to his own will. The ideas that clustered around this assertion of freedom were various: Rousseau was a man of the eighteenth century and believed strongly in the powers of human reason; the Romantics who followed him laid the stress on human feeling and will. But however they viewed the rights and powers of man, these revolutionary thinkers were agreed that the future of men, as societies and as individuals, depended on their coming to know themselves. Before man can act rightly and freely he must first understand his own nature.
But these ideas had implications far beyond politics. They transformed art and music from the classical activities of “holding a mirror up to nature” to the romantic activity of giving expression to powerful and restless feeling in the depths of man’s nature. They transformed philosophy from the conception of the world as a cosmic machine, well-ordered by the providence of God, to a conception of the world (in Hegel e.g.) as the manifestation of spirit. Indeed it would not be an exaggeration to say that the ideas of Rousseau and the Romantics brought about a revolution in the whole life of Western Europe from which it has not yet fully recovered. In the words of Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Romantic movement was one of “the greatest shifts in human consciousness in the whole history of Europe.”1
The effects of this shift in thinking on the mind of the Church has been no less dramatic. For by focusing man’s ideals and hopes on man himself it established a this-worldly way of thinking; it created what we know today as the Secular Mind. That is to say it created an attitude of mind in which everything was to be judged by its value for the life of man on this earth. This attitude was adopted toward religion as to everything else. Thus Friedrich Schleiermacher, perhaps the most influential theologian of the nineteenth century, argued that the Christian faith was indispensable because it filled a place in human life that could be filled by nothing else. It gave expression to that profound feeling in all of us of being at one with the universe. To abandon Christianity would be to abandon the goal of self-fulfillment. Schleiermacher had many insights into the nature of man; but he had succumbed to the Secular Mind of his age. And in this he was followed by most European theologians in the nineteenth century. They may have differed from him as to what aspect of human nature gave the clue to man’s religion, but they agreed that it was in terms of human nature, primarily, that the Christian faith was to be understood and defended. It was, in other words, in terms of a secular frame of reference that Christianity was supposed to have meaning.
Hardly a voice could be heard to the contrary. There were faithful believers who were scandalized by all this—evangelicals, pietists, and others—but few if any were prepared to challenge the leaders of thought on their own intellectual ground, and they therefore did little to check the advance of the Secular Mind.
One voice that could be heard, crying in the wilderness, was that of Abraham Kuyper. Unlike many of his fellow believers, he recognized the secular mind for what it was. He made it his life’s task to expose the assumptions of secular thinking, both in society and in the Church itself, and to call upon Christians to think Christianly. It is the purpose of this paper to show, in broad outline, how Kuyper tried to cultivate a distinctively Christian way of thinking about life and the world.
Early Influences
In 1855, when Kuyper was seventeen, he attended the University of Leyden to read classics and theology. His father, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, hoped that his son also would enter the ministry. Abraham’s university life, however, disturbed him profoundly; and although he resolved to enter the ministry, his faith was put seriously to the test. “I entered the university,” he wrote later, “a young man of orthodox faith, but I had not been in the university more than a year and a half before my thinking had been transformed into the starkest intellectual rationalism.”
This was due entirely to the teaching of Scholten, the systematic theologian; Kuenen, the well-known higher critic; and Rauwennof, the church historian. Scholten endeavored to reinterpret the Reformed faith in terms of modern conceptions of man and his place in the universe, in much the same way as Schleiermacher had done some thirty years before. One quotation from Scholten’s work will give an impression of what the reinterpretation amounted to: “By the acceptance of monism and the recognition of the homogeneity of God and nature, God and man, we come to see that for faith there are no contradictions. As darkness is the absence of light, so sin is the absence of the good—an imperfect condition necessary and inevitable in the development of human nature. In the dictionary of human wisdom expressions like good and evil have their place. But for the pure all-embracing glance of the Eternal, they lose their significance.”2 On one occasion Professor Rauwennof, in a lecture on church history, confidently denied the bodily resurrection of Christ. The students literally applauded the assertion. And Kuyper, so he tells us, applauded with them. “I too,” he wrote later, “have dreamed the dream of Modernism.”
There were three events in his life which slowly woke him from his dream. In 1858 he entered an essay competition for which the subject was a comparison between Calvin and the Polish reformer John à Lasco. He was able to work through the writings of Calvin, but he found great difficulty in even getting hold of the works of John à Lasco. He enquired at the British Museum and the library in Petersburg, but with no success. He told one of his teachers of this frustration, and he was advised to visit an elderly minister of the Reformed Church in Haarlem. To Kuyper’s great surprise the old gentleman produced the complete works of John à Lasco. The discovery, which enabled him eventually to win the essay prize, Kuyper saw as an act of God’s providence. It ended the period of spiritual apathy.
The following year, after some months of mental breakdown, he read an English novel by Charlotte Yonge, The Heir of Redcliffe.3 It brought home to him something of his own pride and self-assurance. He wrote in an autobiographical essay, Confidentie (in Confidence), “Before I knew, I knelt down and wept. What my soul passed through in those minutes, I realized later. From that hour I despised and hated that which I had previously admired, and instead sought for that which I had thus far despised. This masterpiece of Miss Yonge’s has been for me the breaking down of my self-sufficient and stubborn heart.” It was the first step in his conversion.4
The third event was the experience of his first pastorate in the village of Beesd. His preaching, reflecting the liberal theology of the university, met only with the stubborn response that it departed sadly from the Bible and the Reformed Confession. He quite failed to win their confidence. One young woman, Pietje Baltus, a farm laborer’s daughter, was particularly stubborn in her refusal to accept the new minister. When a friend told her once, “The minister’s in the neighborhood and will soon be visiting you,” she only replied, “I’ll have nothing to do with him.”
The situation put Kuyper in a serious dilemma. He must either go along with them, or set himself deliberately against them. What it would mean to go along with them Pietje Baltus made quite plain to him; he would have to give unqualified assent to the Reformed Confession, or, as she preferred to put it, he would have to accept “full sovereign grace.” This, he thought, was asking too much. Yet his long talks with Pietje Baltus and other members of the congregation were making a deep impression on him. He was impressed by their spirituality of mind, and their intimate knowledge of the Bible and of the Old Masters of seventeenth-century Calvinism. He knew Calvinism well enough from his reading and from university lectures; but here was Calvinism lived and loved and deeply felt. He was driven to reconsider the whole position. He read the Old Masters and he re-read Calvin. It was Calvin that finally persuaded him. He wrote in Confidentie, with reference to his congregation, “Well, dear brother, I have not set myself against them, and I still thank my God that I made this choice. Their tenacious perseverance has been the blessing of my heart, the rise of the morning star for my life. I was indeed grasped, but had not yet found the Word of reconciliation. That they have brought to me, brought with their fragmentary language in this absolute form in which my soul alone can find rest: in adoring and glorifying a God who works all things both willing and working according to his good pleasure!”
Kuyper’s Calvinism
This act of God’s grace which brought Kuyper to confess his salvation in Christ, even against his own will, became the decisive experience of Kuyper’s whole life. He had now experienced God as the Bible had written of Him: the Sovereign Creator, the Lord of history, the only Savior of men. He now found it impossible to think of the Christian religion as primarily some activity of man, as something which man himself may achieve and cultivate, or which was somehow designed for his own benefit. To think of Christianity in this way, he discovered, was the fundamental mistake of the theologians of his time. Indeed religion fostered by man and for the sake of man would in the end be self-defeating, for “it becomes superfluous and disappears as soon as the egoistic interests are satisfied.” For many people of his time religion had become precisely that. “Of course,” Kuyper grants, “religion, as such, produces also a blessing for man, but does not exist for the sake of man. It is not God who exists for the sake of His creation; the creation exists for the sake of God. For, as the Scripture says, He has created all things for Himself.” He continues, “The starting-point of every motive in religion is God and not man. Man is the instrument and means, God alone is here the goal, the point of departure and the point of arrival, the fountain, from which the waters flow, and at the same time, the ocean into which they finally return. To be irreligious is to forsake the highest aim of our existence, and on the other hand to covet no other existence than for the sake of God, to long for nothing but for the will of God, and to be wholly absorbed in the glory of the name of the Lord, such is the pith and kernel of all true religion.”5
If it is for God that true religion exists, it is equally true that it exists only by God. This means in the first place that in all religion God Himself, as the Creator of all things, must be the active power. He must make us religious, He must give us the religious disposition. This Calvin had emphasized in his doctrine of the “seed of religion” which God has sown in the human heart. In the second place it means that where man departs from God in his sin, it is God alone who can bring about the necessary change of heart by the work of His Spirit. This Calvin had emphasized in his doctrine of election.
Here then was a reaffirmation of the Sovereignty of God as the first principle of Christian theology, and in this affirmation a denial of those types of theology which begin with the needs and powers of man. Clearly this was no blind and dogmatic assertion of traditional Calvinistic theology. It was Kuyper’s well-considered belief that the faith of the prophets and apostles and martyrs, which was now his own faith, was most truthfully and consistently set forth in Calvin’s writings. Moreover, at a time when society and the Church were largely succumbing to the secular mind it was imperative that the essential principles of the Christian faith as taught by the Reformers should be set forth as sharply and coherently as possible. That is to say, the Christian faith, with its assertion that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the Creator and Sovereign of all, must be shown to be the complete denial and antithesis of all man-centered thinking. If Christians fail in this task, they will fail in their struggle with the powers of darkness. “If the battle is to be fought with honour and with hope of victory,” said Kuyper, “then principle must be arrayed against principle; then it must be felt that in Modernism the vast energy of an all-embracing life-system, assails us, then also it must be understood that we have to take our stand in a life-system of equally comprehensive and far-reaching power. And this powerful life-system is not to be invented nor formulated by ourselves, but is to be taken and applied as it presents itself in history. When thus taken, I found and confessed, and I still hold, that this manifestation of the Christian principle is given us in Calvinism. In Calvinism my heart has found rest. From Calvinism have I drawn the inspiration, firmly and resolutely to take my stand in the thick of this great conflict of principles.”6
In this quotation we find the clue to Kuyper’s thought and activity. Far from being a detached academic, he was involved in the struggles of his time; and he was struggling not only with modernism in the Church but also and primarily with secular thinking in society at large. For in Kuyper’s view, the real struggle of his time was not between one Christian theology and another, but between “Christianity and Paganism, the idols and the living God.” Behind the revolution in theology he saw the revolution in thought and culture; and behind this cultural revolution he discovered a revolution in faith. In turning from the principles of the French Revolution men were turning from God to the worship of idols. Now to come to grips with the new situation it would hardly be enough to expose the assumptions underlying it; one should also be prepared to display the principles by which men ought to be governed. One should cultivate a positively Christian understanding of man—of men’s relations with one another and with the material universe, of man’s work and leisure, and of the whole range of man’s cultural activities. Christianity must be seen to be what Kuyper calls an all-embracing “life-system,” and not merely a way of personal faith. It must be seen in its breadth as well as in its depth. Thus every aspect of life must be first understood and then lived in the light of the truth that has been revealed in Jesus Christ. This positive and constructive task, the cultivation of a Christian mind, is what most challenged Kuyper.
It has already been said that for Kuyper such a task could not be undertaken by one man or even by a group of men. “This powerful life-system is not to be invented nor formulated by ourselves, but it is to be taken and applied as it presents itself in history.” It has been said also that he found the clearest articulation of the Christian mind in Calvin and the Calvinistic Reformation. However, he was equally conscious of the dangers of relying on history: that we come to think and live in the past instead of the present. At his farewell sermon at the Reformed Church in Utrecht he spoke of True and False Conservatism from the text in Revelation, “Hold fast that which thou hast.” He left them with the injunction: “Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism.” Our fathers have laid the foundations. We must try to build on them.
Foundations and Framework
The principles of the Reformation which Kuyper saw to be relevant to the challenge of his time were, very briefly, these. First, that God, the holy and majestic Lord of the Universe, enters into immediate fellowship with his creatures as God the Holy Spirit. “Thanks to this work of God in the heart,” says Kuyper, “the persuasion that the whole of man’s life is to be lived in the Divine presence has become the fundamental thought of Calvinism. . . . It is from this mother-thought that the all-embracing life-system of Calvinism sprang.”7 Whatever a man does, in his work or in leisure, he does before the face of God.
Second, if the grace of God in Christ places our entire human life immediately before God, then it follows that all men and women, rich or poor, weak or strong, dull or talented, as creatures of God and as lost sinners, have no claim whatsoever to lord over one another, and that they stand as equals before God. In Calvinism therefore we have the clearest expression of the democratic interpretation of society. The Calvinist will not rest until both politically and socially every man, simply because he is a man, should be recognized, respected and dealt with as a creature created after the divine likeness. That Calvinism has, as a matter of fact, done more than anything else to promote equality and liberty in Western societies, Kuyper considered beyond doubt.8
Third, the Reformation, in placing man before the face of God, has not only honored man for the sake of his likeness to the divine image, but also the world as a divine creation. What God had created he considered “good,” and man should do likewise. The Reformers did not despise science; in a indirect way they positively fostered its progress.9
Thus the three Reformation principles which Kuyper thought relevant to the Christian understanding of life as a whole concerned respectively: man’s relation to God as a Sovereign presence, man’s relation to man as his equal before God, and man’s relation to the world as the sphere of God’s activity. The last two, we should note, depend on the first, which is to say that the fundamental principle for the Christian mind is “the Sovereignty of the Triune God over the whole cosmos.”
We must now consider—again, in very rough outline—the frame of Christian thinking which Kuyper built on this foundation. His study of Scripture led him to conceive God’s world as created and sustained by God’s ordinances (cf. e.g. Ps. 119:90–91). The order that we discover in the world, both in nature and society, is an order established by God. Moreover, we can only understand the world around because it displays this orderliness and regularity. The whole of science is built on the assumption that underlying the many and various changes in nature there is a fundamental law that governs them. Politics, where this maintains a proper concern for the life of men, does its work by reckoning with various orders in society—family life, commerce, education, economics, and so on—and by guarding the interests of each. Now the various patterns of life and nature are to be seen in the light of God’s sovereign and creative purpose. They are the work of God’s hand; they indicate the manner of God’s working in the world. Kuyper appeals to Psalm 119, “I have found an end of all perfection, but Thy commandment is very wide,” and warns us not to confine God’s law to the Ten Commandments, for there is a law for every creature of God.10 Neither must we divide God’s law into a moral law and a natural law; for then we would “divide life into two parts. On the one hand the spiritual life, with which you are occasionally concerned, and on the other hand the everyday, tangible life to which you devote two-thirds of your life.”11 There is one law of God, and there is one, unified human life lived under that law.
However, there are different spheres of life. Though each of them operates under the immediate sovereignty of God, they do have a relative independence of each other. Family life is not the same as school life, and the principles that govern their proper function are different in each case. It is part of Christian wisdom to know how to distinguish between one sphere and the next.
Third, in each sphere of activity, in society and in nature, there is a relative sovereignty. In each creature, says Kuyper, God has concentrated a part of His power.12 So in creating the animal world, e.g. according to certain biological laws, God has invested it with a power or potentiality for its own development. In creating society, with its various spheres, God sets it a number of tasks for the fulfillment of His purpose, so that men in varying degrees have a God-given power and authority in social life. Yet while each sphere must operate in relative freedom, it is also under the immediate sovereignty of God and has by virtue of creation a law for its own life. Each sphere is governed by an ordinance of God—this is seen most clearly in the ordinance of marriage (Gen. 2:2).
This general principle Kuyper calls “sovereignty in the individual sphere.”13 In a discussion of the spheres of society he says of this principle, “We understand hereby, that the family, the business, science, art and so forth are all social spheres, which do not owe their existence to the State, but obey a high authority within their own bosom; an authority which rules, by the grace of God, just as the sovereignty of the State does.”14
Social and Political Activity
For much of his life Kuyper was engaged in a great deal of social and political activity, and it would be worth noting at this point just how he tried to implement his Christian understanding of public life. During his first pastorate at the village of Beesd he was disturbed by the situation of the laborers. It seemed to him that by being denied any voice in deciding the conditions of employment they were being denied the right to be men. That problem remained with him—Professor de Gaay Fortman tells us that the problem of how men should win their bread lay at the center of his social concern,15 and that when eventually he entered Parliament he did so out of a “pastoral concern.”16
A second problem was the state control of education. In May 1869 Kuyper addressed a meeting of the Society for Christian National Education in which he appealed to “the national conscience” for the freedom of Christian parents to control the education of their children. The struggle for the free school was to be a long one, and Kuyper saw that, if it were to be effective, it would have to be carried into Parliament. In the same year, 1869, he became editor of a religious and political weekly, Heraut, which sponsored Reformed views. Two years later he was nominated as a candidate for the Christian political party—suitably called “Anti-Revolutionary.” In 1874, at the age of thirty-six, he won a seat in Parliament, and his first speech was on the state control of education. He urged that schools be given a certain independence of governmental control. “It should be possible to give our country too a school system in which party politics need not play any part whatsoever. Education, in my view, is not first of all a political but a social question and in that respect I agree with Mr. Forster, the English Secretary for Education. . . .”17 Schools should be administered by independent boards. The responsibility of government was to ensure minimal standards and the possibility for all parents, including the poorer, to send their children to schools of their own choice. But the conscience of the parents must in every way be respected.
He was not well received. Throughout his time in Parliament he was criticized heavily. Some accused him of designing to overthrow the monarchy, and establish a republic, with himself as a second Cromwell! The pressures on him, mentally and physically, were excessive. After two-and-a-half years he resigned his seat through ill-health.
He continued his work as editor of the Heraut. By now it had given birth to a daily paper, De Standaard, and this too Kuyper edited. He continued to press for Christian education, and now not only in schools but in universities as well. A society was formed for the purpose of establishing a Christian university. Its second article read, “For all the instruction that is given in its universities the Society stands wholly and exclusively on the foundation of the Reformed principles,” as set forth in the Confession of Faith. Within two years, in 1880, the Free University was founded in Amsterdam. Kuyper, who was given one of the two chairs in Theology, delivered the opening address on “Sovereignty in the Individual Sphere.” The event stands out as one of the boldest and most original of Kuyper’s career. He returned to Parliament in 1894, after a twenty years’ recess, as leader of the Anti-Revolutionary Party. In 1901 he was made Prime Minister.
Throughout his political and educational activities he was concerned to guard the rights and freedoms of the various social spheres. He rejected both liberalism and socialism for the reason that both misconceived the true nature of freedom and authority. Liberalism sets its store on the freedom of the individual but fails to appreciate his involvement in social groups and their respective authority. Socialism sees man as a community bound together by the authority of the State, but fails to recognize the freedom of men in different spheres of life. But the fault lies ultimately in the whole frame of reference within which they work. They are thinking of man, whether individually or collectively, as if in some way he were absolutely independent, free to shape society as he will. And such a view was, for Kuyper, radically unchristian.
In politics, therefore, as in science, philosophy, and art, the Christian must devote himself both to the service of God and to the casting down of idols. Indeed he cannot do one without also doing the other. To serve God is to depart from sin, and the meaning of sin, as Paul has it in Romans, is the worship and service of the creature in place of the Creator. Therefore, to think and act Christianly is to think about everything and to do everything in the light of God’s sovereign rule. And since nothing in the whole creation lies outside the scope of God’s rule, there is nothing we can think or do which is not either in obedience to God or in disobedience. With the Psalmist, Kuyper “calls upon heaven and earth, . . . upon all peoples and nations to give glory to God.” And God, he believes, “is present in all life, with the influence of His omnipresent and almighty power, and no sphere of human life is conceivable in which religion does not maintain its demands that God shall be praised, that God’s ordinances shall be observed, and that every labora shall be permeated with its ora in fervent and ceaseless prayer. Wherever man may stand, whatever he may do, to whatever he may apply his hand, in agriculture, in commerce, and in industry, or his mind, in the world of art, and science, he is in whatsoever it may be, constantly standing before the face of his God, he is employed in the service of his God, he has strictly to obey his God, and above all, he has to aim at the glory of his God.”18